#example designs

Judge Example Rooms ~

Heyo! Myself, @mistershinyobject, @gollumni and @spooky-bard came up with a few examples of Rooms for y'all's brainstorming this week. Can you guess who did which room? (There aren't bonus points for the right answer.)

Lat-Nam's Vault / Sage's Study

This time-locked room from Dominaria allows you to delve into an artifact-oriented room, where the Powerstones can help you unlock your locked rooms, and if need be you can turn the Powerstones into card draw with various U/X themed decks! I like the way that this card shows the use of older cards/mechanics with new Room technology on one of Magic's most established planes.

Lavish Ballroom / Wine Cellar

A powerful Duskmourn-themed rare, you can dance the night away or depart to the dank cellar for a quick nip. These are one-use effects, but the ability to tutor (and then make big swings) can create some serious presence. I like this card's limited-to-constructed feel with the power-push that resonates with contemporary design.

Printing Press / Counterfeit Lab

Move outta the way, there's ink and blood to be spilled! This super powerful card comes to us from the streets of New Capenna, with allied powers and monocolor benefits all around. This is a really fun design that plays into shard technology, multicolor overlap, potential limited shenanigans, and the feeling of how information and disinformation are collected together.

Sigil Annex / Aerie Watchpost

This hybrid Alara-themed card from the towers of Bant has some complex but grokable combat tech. Hybrid design allows for cards to be centered without overreach, and here you may want to get a little bit aggressive in Naya or a little more wary in Esper. Both sides allow for your deck to power up their given shards no matter what orientation you're going for—although in the greater scheme of things, I'm not sure what a Room would look like on Jund... Maybe a cave?

Who are you? Where are we? ~

Here are a couple examples I swiped from our fellow judges as well as one that I threw together today because I remembered that Brain Stone exists.

@stormtide-leviathan showed up on an elk with Kenrith the Cursed, a twist on Kenrith's Transformation showing my liege as a poor giant massive Elk dude. This card works showing the story moment from the creature's perspective rather than the event's perspective, which itself was represented on an Aura. In a larger set, it fulfills a commander niche if need be with the white activation (although, tbh, I dunno what kind of deck I'd build) as well as some kind of GW equipment subtheme, while remaining a cool mono-G card to slam down.

@starch255 brought a statue to the table! And then knocks it off like a cat. I legitimately thought this was already printed flavor text which is why I included it here, but nope, it's a florence original, and it's REALLY well-written. The name comes from the card of the same name, and it's the same event, but this time, the Gruul swooped in to really make life worse for the people on the ground. This card, as a removal spell, focuses on the aftermath of the toppling rather than the grand push. Very neat! And a fun design.

I did some voidy-void stuff because I, too, was running out of time. That said, I thought about what a cool draft land would look like when played by the most annoying control players I've faced at my LGS (Just kidding, love you, K~) and why they'd run this as a one-of. It's a silly advantage card whose art direction may or may not feature a shirtless Teferi. The void of Zhalfir has been featured before, and this card takes its flavor text from Desynchronize from BRO. Hopefully the connection fits for y'all.

The point is, a LOT has changed, but the story is the same. What new angles will YOU come up with?

Ready and Able

Here’s some examples from some of the mods here!

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@teaxch has been working on this card for a while, and I think it’s a good example of how abilities are special in magic. There are a few cards that let you cast specific types of cards off the top of your deck, and ninjutsu is a cool restriction on that, but it’s a lot more difficult to make function within the rules. But it’s still possible! Probably.

@3smuth made Dovin, the Mediator (though @loreholdlesbian came up with the general concept), which messes with one of the weirdest abilities in the game: loyalty abilities. There’s a lot of weird things you can do with loyalty abilities, and I’d be happy to see some more, or even other versions of this effect. This card, though, took a lot of work to make, so play with this space carefully.

And I was the guy who made Stitcher’s Playground. I wanted to show the power of “this ability triggers once each turn.” This effect would be ridiculously powerful without it. It would go infinite so easily and be crazy powerful. However, it’s still important that this not say “first time each turn” like some cards, because playing this and sacrificing a creature for immediate value is important, and you don’t want that messed up by a removal spell from an opponent or if you forgot you used that Priest of Forgotten Gods to pay for this.

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This week has a lot of options and a lot of weird things you can do, and these are just a few of them. I’m excited to see what shows up in the inbox.

Second Persons

Here’s some examples from the mods! @loreholdlesbian with Kneel Before Your King and @teaxch with Et tu?

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Kneel Before Your King is an extremely flavorful card, which is a good thing to go for this week. Breaking normal naming conventions usually requires an important reason, and I think this fits. This is a powerful card, but flavorfully, not mechanically. Well, it’s still pretty powerful mechanically, allowing you to either attack with nor chance of being blocked or start drawing cards, but it wants to express this air of dominance, and a second-person title really brings that across.

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Et tu? is a weird one, but that’s kind of why I wanted to show it. First, the second person word, “tu” is not in English. But it still is in second person! Second, it’s got a weird name. I said I’d allow weird names, and this would definitely be allowed. Would magic ever print a card with this name? Almost assuredly not. But it’s a famous line, and one from a setting that feels appropriate for magic. It’s from one of the most famous assassinations of all time, so the flavor is spot on in a way that any other name would have felt inappropriate. Lastly, it’s got a question mark, which I said automatically lets it pass. So yeah, this is a card that you can submit! Especially because it’s a cool card, to boot.

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Stocking Stuffers

Just the two examples this week, and I think they show two of the extremes of this contest.

First is @teaxch‘s Portrait of My Cats, which is exactly what it looks like. It’s two cats! It’s a very literal, non-magic name but boy does it sell the card! It’s cute, it’s fun, it’s wholesome, and the card itself is good (though the templating is hard to pin down). I also really appreciate the lack of actual cats, because the gift wasn’t the cats, it was the picture of them, and that’s the focus.

On the other hand, I made a card that went a little more abstract. I received a “Queen’s Greatest hits” box set when I was young, and it was the first time I really started listening to music seriously. So here is a card that, if you are familiar with it, is obviously a reference to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. It uses verse counters to really sell the point, with the monarch mechanic being a clear representation of an actual queen. So even though what I actually received was a CD box set, I made a card based on a famous song from it and mtg-ified it. My biggest complaint is how wordy it is, especially with the fun but unecessary flavor text.

Either of these options work fine, and of course there are more ways to do it as well. Whatever you end up liking!

If you’ve got your card all done, feel free to submit it >>HERE<< before Friday morning.

Tapping In

Check out some examples the other mods made for this week! @naban-dean-of-irritation made Shaman of Entanglement, @abelzumi made Kishindo Pass Guardian, and @loreholdlesbian made Axgard Highsmith!

The shaman is a good example of something I talked about yesterday (this card was made before that article came out). Giving your opponent exactly one turn to drop some fodder to sac in case of an activation is exactly enough to make this fair. I still might suggest putting a mana cost on the ability, or making it symmetrical, but it might be fine. The fact that the discard is tired to what must be sacrificed is both more and less powerful than the alternative, because discarding lands is usually the default and does almost nothing here, but it also makes the sacrifice more of a snipe. As I said, though, this fits a lot of the guidelines I laid out yesterday.

The Pass guardian is another really cool way to implement tap abilities, because it really doubles down on the setup. Not only do you have to fill your graveyard with creatures of different costs, you ALSO have to make sure this guy survives, and even then you have to have a creature in hand! But boy, this is a cool and exciting card, and it could easily see play in formats that can cheat it out quick and easy.

Lastly, I need to talk about the highsmith. If it only had the first ability, I would be very tempted to call it ineligible. No, it’s not a mana ability, but it creates something that is only a mana ability. That’s towing the line enough it might bother me, however! It has another ability that definitely isn’t a mana ability. It’s a cool tap ability that makes sense to want to wait a bit for, plus it has some really cool synergy with the first ability. I didn’t talk much about it, but one of the cool things about tap abilities is that you can use the tapping as a resource, where thee are ways a creature could become untapped and regain use of it’s ability. This card has a great way of demonstrating that, where it clearly wants to be used in an artifact deck, and you get rewarded for playing artifacts by getting to reuse the ability.

Hopefully this displays some of the depth and breadth I’m looking for this week. Everyone took it in different directions, but they all feel appropriate for the prompt.

Color Me Impressed: Examples

Here are a few example cards made by our judges (including myself) to show off different approaches to the contest. This is a long one, so let’s just jump into it!

Bridge from the Underworld by @mistershinyobject

A card with no normal mana cost, but that has an alternate method of casting which requires colored mana is a perfect card to get a color indicator like this. It makes total sense, this is 100% a black card even if it is a weird card. That is an entirely justified decision. The question still remains though, is it a justified decision to remove the mana cost in the first place? You could do that to any escape card, (or really anything at all with an alternate cost) but for most of them, the answer is no. In general, it’s way better design-wise to have a normal mode of casting your spell, even if you’d much rather cast it for its alternate cost. it helps your deck be a bit more stable, and a bit less liable to fall apart if you don’t draw all the right pieces. Would you rather cast Ox of Agonas from your graveyard? If you can, absolutely. But by not preventing you from casting it altogether if you don’t draw a way to get it into the graveyard, you still can use it. This helps increase player agency, and reduces the likelihood of randomly getting screwed by your draws.

  But there are always exceptions to most rules. Personally, I think this card is a very good example of how to justify breaking a rule like that, which is why I wanted to include it as an example. If adding a normal mana cost to an escape card reduces the likelihood of getting screwed by your deck, a card like this does the opposite which encourages you to go all-in on a graveyard strategy in a way that wouldn’t be true if this had a normal mana cost. And I also think that thematically tying this card to another very similar card in magic’s past that only worked from the graveyard does a lot in this card’s favor. It helps players conceptualize and make sense of what this card’s deal is. also, it helps me imagine the context this card would be made in. This is a very funky, weird design that isn’t a great fit in a standard set. Imagine being a new player and seeing this in a booster- it’d throw a lot of people off. But modern horizons products have a lot more room for very funky cards like this, and by being a callback to a previous card it really stands out as a modernhorizons-esque design that helps me go “yeah, I could see this being a thing there”. (Also, it was a very good decision to make this card a rare. Anything this funky like a card with no mana cost probably doesn’t belong at uncommon or below, usually.) TL;DR: I don’t just want you to justify why a card has a color indicator by removing the mana cost, I want you to justify why the card has no mana cost, and this card is a very good example of how to do that.

Muragandan Rampager by @naban-dean-of-irritation

Here’s a similar example to the last one, except instead of having no normal mana cost in favor of a alternate mana cost, it just has a very funky mana cost. And I think an X cost spell that you can only spend a single color of mana on is a very good example of a card that wants an indicator. Because despite what it looks like, that mana cost does actually have a green requirement and so the color indicator does a lot of good work to help players remember that. And I think it makes perfect sense for this card to have the line of text “spend only green mana on X” too. You could stick a line like that on a lot of x spells and give it an indicator and call it a day, but I think this is a card that actually wants that strict of a color requirement. If this you’re going to get a card with the flexibility to be a two mana 3/3, a three mana 5/5, a four mana 7/7, and so on you should absolutely have to go all-in on green like this.

  My big criticism of this design though is that it could easily be made an XG 0/0 instead of an X -1/-1 and it would play very similarly (save not working at 1 mana like this version does, and I don’t think this really needs that extra little flexibility) while looking a lot more like what a magic card normally looks like. And I think that’s way more likely to be the path wotc would take, I think there’s little upside to its current form in comparison. Of course, then it wouldn’t need a color indicator and wouldn’t fit the contest, but you shouldn’t make a card with a decision that would look out of place without the context of the contest. It’s much better to make a card that happens to fit the parameters but that an outside observer wouldn’t think twice about. When discussing Bridge from the Underworld I said that you have to justify both why some aspect of the card wants a color indicator and why you decided to give it that aspect. This isn’t a great example of the latter, since as I said it could just be XG but I think it’s a very good example of the former that I wanted to use it as an example anyway. EDIT: I did my math wrong, as a 0/0 for XG, this is gonna always be one weaker than this version. There’s a reason I gave up on being a stem major. But as a 1/1 for XG, the relationship is the same as it is with this existing version so I stand by the rest of my analysis.

Defiler of Sanity by @loreholdlesbian (that’s me!)

I made this because, of all existing cards printed by wotc that would fit, I think devoid is the most misused. A great deal of cards with it are cards that, if you removed devoid from them, still make total sense as cards. So I wanted to make sure one of the example cards was one that had devoid and really, really wanted it. Imagine this card without devoid. If this didn’t have devoid, it would be according to the rules it would just be a normal black card and have a normal black frame, and I think that’s a bad thing cause that frame implies this is something it isn’t. And I think a lot of players, especially new players, wouldn’t know what to make of this card. They’d see the mana cost, and wouldn’t know whether this card was black or not. So by having devoid, this both makes the card feel more right, and helps new players by answering their question right within the text of the card. (Sure it’s a different answer than it would be without having devoid, but that honestly doesn’t matter, cause it tells them the answer all the same). The devoid helps cover up the rules oddityness that, without it, this card would just be black despite potentially costing colorless mana.

  Of course, there are other ways of making devoid a cohesive part of your design as well rather than just a random add-on besides this one. You could make it mechanically relevant, by caring about the color of things. Or you could make it thematically relevant, kind of like this one, where it doesn’t play much differently with or without devoid but it feels like it really wants to have it. The point is, don’t just add devoid to a design. Make a design that wants to have devoid.

~~~ I think if there’s one big takeaway from all three examples, it’s that you shouldn’t make a card that has arbitrary decisions to get it to fit the rules of the contest, you should make a card where those decisions feel like a natural part of the card. If you were to show that card to someone who doesn’t know about the contest, they shouldn’t have to ask why the card is the way that it is. That doesn’t mean it has to be mechanically relevant, necessarily. I don’t think any existing card with a color indicator specifically cares about the fact that it’s red, or white, or whatever. It should just be a card that feels more correct with it (and with the needs that led to needing it, like not having a mana cost for example) than it would without those decisions.

Tribal Examples: Range and Flavor ~

Sometimes we go nice and easy, and sometimes there’s some twisting. Let’s talk about it. Here are some examples from fellow judges!

@naban-dean-of-irritation — Arena Ambusher

Azra are a fairly small race, so this is a card that’s more about the implication than implementation. Either way, this card changes combat significantly, as the ambusher is wont to do. Not only is combat changed, but timing is changed as well on all your spells. What are you leaving mana open for? Now your opponent is uncertain as to whether you have an instant OR an Azra card on top of it. The sensation of having this Battlebond-y creature lying in wait feels very much in black, and the B/R Azra Warrior shell would probably love to see this kind of support.

In part, this is also a card that can lure out answers in the late-game as a catch-up kind of card. You cast this at your end step, and then during combat on your opponent’s turn, they now have to contend with the open mana given the information, or they have to spend sorcery-speed removal on this creature to ensure that your best tricks are spent immediately. This card as an uncommon ensures that there won’t be too much emphasis wherever the Azra are color-wise on combat control that pushes black ahead of the other colors.

@stormtide-leviathan — Underworld Mazedweller

The only addition I would have added to this card would have been a subtype, but at the same time, the card’s great for what it wants. We’re clearly imagining this on Theros, with the minotaur tribalism and the Escape mechanic, and the three-drop aggression is a great way to dig through your deck and find the recursive elements. Strangely enough, I think that this card doesn’t necessarily want to be in an aggressive deck all the time. Looting can be rough with so few good pitches, but a higher as-fan of recursion was what this set wanted, so that’s fine—great, even. This card is multifaceted in that way.

Flavorfully, I’m interested in the way that this card takes on the approach of what a minotaur on Theros wants and needs. Their herd organization seems a lot more nuanced in Theros: Beyond Death than it did in previous sets, and here we see what’s almost like a herd being built, y’know? Other minotaurs help this character navigate through the maze, digging for answers, and those discarded notions allow it to return. I don’t know, I just like this fellow. Additionally, last note, I like the aggressive Escape cost here. Very cool. This is a good example of a card with true versatility.

@mistershinyobject — Skola Vale Scavenger 

We mentioned the aspect of tribal cards without the tribe in question being in the typeline, and this is an excellent addition. I like this card a lot for a number of reasons. Firstly, by itself it’s a fine card as a 3/5 trampler. There aren’t that many hydras around Theros these days, but all the same, the additional boost either a) is a really fun flavorful gimmick, or b) suggests something about this environment that hydras are printed more in this set—either way, a fun boost. It could have triggered also when hydras attack, but I literally just thought of that now as I write, and these are minute changes that don’t affect the overall quality of what I’d like to show.

This creature is alive. The world here, even if this wasn’t on Theros, even if this was a theoretical fanplane, has an ecosystem, an aggressive but wary relationship between beasts and hydras, an emphasis on the wildness. This creature is only named for its residence because it’s being observed; it has no idea of anything beyond its place in the food chain, an apex cleaner. I’m imagining something like a shaggy behemoth, a red-eyed ox-tiger hybrid-thing. And the presence of hydras makes it more powerful because the hydras lead it to food. I find that fascinating. If you want to go off-beat for your tribe and you don’t want to have a sapient/wild worshipping aspect (like goblins and dragons, humans and leviathans, etc.), then this is the bar to clear here.

Thank you, judges, for giving me something to talk about and gush over! Everyone else, take note of this cool stuff.